Describes the Louise W. Holborn archives which contain the papers of an historian of Twentieth century refugee problems. Louise W. Holborn (1898-1975) is best known for 2 extensive histories on important refugee organizations: the International Refugee Organization and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. After fleeing Nazi Germany in1933, she received her MA (1936) and PhD (1938) from Radcliffe College. Traces her career. The archives present a wealth of 'grey material' on refugee issues and organizations dating back to WW1 although most of the material is from postWW2. Describes the organization of the collection.
Vol. 4-5 reprint ed., New York, AMS Press, 1974. ; Paged continuously. ; v. 1. Military.--v. 2. Military and naval records.--v. 3. Revolutionary war [military] and index.--v. 4-5. Military records. ; Mode of access: Internet.
The post-custodial paradigm of archives re-positions archivists from institutional custodians of archival records to stewards of records in their places of creation or use. Through this dislocation from traditional practice, post-custodial praxis democratizes the power dynamic of archives by disaggregating the value of archival records from dependence on the archival repository and prioritizing the context of records creation over records content. The post-custodial paradigm disaggregates archives praxis from physical custody of records and (re)locates the work of the archivist to be neither only the institutional repository nor the site of records creation, but rather a third space that crosses borders between the two and can function in both but belongs wholly to neither. This article discusses how locations of power and agency can be (re)positioned by post-custodial archives theory and praxis within a case study of the University of Texas Libraries' Human Rights Documentation Initiative.
This essay examines the missing national film archive of Pakistan against the politics of competing cultural memory. Sharing a common past yet existing in the shadows of the Indian film industry, cinema in Pakistan found itself in an unusual predicament after decolonization and Partition. While filmmaking was expected to carry the imprint of national difference, the intercultural context of colonial India bequeathed the industry its traditions and personnel. Yet when the British Film Institute repatriated colonial Indian films in the mid-1960s, the holdings went entirely to India. The lack of a public film repository denied Pakistan not only its colonial heritage but also the systematic preservation of its postcolonial film culture. In the absence of a state archive, what has emerged in the country is a democratic archive consisting of independent collectors, magazine proprietors, and avid users. Using a term extracted from one of the archives, filmaria (film fever), Siddique reads in the popular film archives the contagious circumstances of intercultural cinema. It alerts us to a film contagion widespread in the subcontinental publics that thrives on filmgoing, cinematic resemblance, and embodied cultural memory, a condition caused by the displacements of Partition and the creation of national difference.
This lecture finds its starting point in an observation regarding collections of things that appear to have gathered as if of their own volition. In domestic spaces, unconscious movements and levels of indecision give rise to these various accumulations, which can remain unseen even while in view. The phenomenon lends itself to study under the heading of 'the everyday', revealing complexities of psychic life in inhabited space. But it is an event of other kinds of space and space-use too, not least workspace where unconsciously accumulated archives can have a strategic function, even while the apparent 'act' of collecting escapes the practitioner's control. Here, the name 'insensate archiving' is proposed to help explore how the material practice in question provides a perspective on work. Specifically, the insensate archive offers clues to how criticality emerges in artists' work where it may not have been expected, and where more conventional ways of thinking about criticality would not be well-suited to grasp the stakes in what's taking place. Support for the idea of insensate archiving is found in the work of curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who testifies to a closely related event in her own practice. Just as her 'compost archive' names an aspiration for exhibition organisation, so the insensate archive makes possible a political engagement with current discourse on material practice and the institutions in which such practices take place. The idea of criticality in material practice is expanded through a reading of remarks by historian Georges Didi-Huberman, for whom a viewer's encounter with the image can be a form of criticality in its own right, even before the discourses usually thought necessary to make criticality evident. In his account, the viewer's pause during which such work takes place amounts to an unexpected agency given over to the components of the image, with revelations to follow. The insensate archive, it is argued, works in a comparable way with components that have assume their own power to come and go in material terms, thus confounding customary ideas of the archive and revealing a form of criticality peculiar to material practice.
A fascination with archives often entails a longing to return to sources, stories, and their beginnings. It is associated with a meticulous attention to detail, the uncovering of exciting connections, the collection of testimonies and reliable traces, accounts that corroborate a story, and contribute to the (re)construction of histories from below. However, at a time when the notion of the 'archive' threatens to become a dead metaphor or a cheap replacement for 'canon' or 'corpus', the symposium suggests to take a particularly contentious example — that of the Yugoslav Partisan 'counter-archive' — as a starting-point for its reconsideration of archival politics. The Yugoslav, socialist, and Partisan past was both demonized by the resurgent Balkan nationalist projects of the 1990s and commodified by Yugonostalgic memorialization, stylized as either heroic or droll. Against these versions of a 'frozen' past, a multiplicity of projects, cultural, artistic, or political, have sought to document and aggregate past fragments, diverse snapshots, artworks, political events — a diverse archive to be retrieved in order to unsettle current narratives and mobilize emancipatory changes. The term 'Partisan counter-archive' in particular builds on two recent publications, Gal Kirn's Partisan Counter Archive and Davor Konjukušić's Red Light, which tackle the return to the Yugoslav Partisan struggle and its after-life, going beyond both revisionism and nostalgia. Seeking to connect this particular example to wider revolutionary and decolonial histories, the symposium will also draw on some of the most advanced considerations of archival practices in radical modernist traditions and contemporary art. How can counter-archives connect the testimonies and legacies of past struggles with the victims of today's oppression? What kind of power struggles are produced by counter-archives, and how do they manage to draw attention to what has been lost, overlooked, reduced, suppressed, or omitted from national archives and established ...
AbstractThis article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in the context of Japan's development as an archipelagic empire. The first Japanese geological map (1876) was completed by American geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, who surveyed mineral deposits in Hokkaidō, Japan's northern island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu people. Following anticolonial and archipelagic scholarship, the author reads across earthly archives of geological strata and colonial archives of historical documents to elucidate the conceptual duality of the archipelago as both a geological formation and a geopolitical territory. In tracing this formative era of Japan's resource extraction and settler colonialism, which precedes and informs the current rush to extract rare earth minerals necessary to maintain global digital infrastructures, this article aims to both de-Westernize the methodological orientation known as media geology and offer a prehistory of contemporary rare earth mining in the Pacific Ocean.